On October 1 Israeli finance minister Yair Lapid addressed the Hungarian parliament. Although his talk in the above video runs to over eleven minutes, there is never a dull moment. Among other things, Lapid tells the story of his father, the late Israeli journalist and politician Yosef (“Tommy”) Lapid, who survived the Holocaust as a boy in Budapest.

In his talk Yair Lapid never explicitly mentions Jobbik, whose MPs are presumably taking in the words of the Zionist conqueror. But Lapid does refer to “horror spirits of the past,” and to “the hope that something has changed in human society and the fear that nothing has changed and the demons still live among us.”

“Horror spirits” sounds like an allusion to Jobbik’s forebears the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian fascist movement that perpetrated or assisted the German Nazis in the annihilation or deportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, and whose murder victims included Jews in hospitals and orphanages.

Indeed, the “demons still live among us.” Jobbik’s 17 percent of the vote makes it considerably the most popular of the three neo-Nazi movements—the others are Greece’s Golden Dawn and Ukraine’s Svoboda—to have entered European parliaments in recent years. Time will tell whether Hungary can resist this tide and not flow with it.

In Europe the lie of the right is that ethnicity/race is determinative. Jobbik and Dawn denounce people because of their ethnic origins. The lie of the left is that income is determinative. Leftists hate rich people, except for those who buy their way out of the left wing penalty box. North American conservatives only care about their neighbors ethnicity insofar as to the new type of food they might bring to a neighborhood potluck. This does not stop the left from hurling constant accusations of racism.

There are some countries you just write off. Well, I do. Hungary is one of them. Greece is another. Never change. The Jew hatred will never change. And how about those Ukranians, Latvians and Lithuanians? Wonderful people, blah blah blah...

Don't associate parties like this with conservatives (as you do in the article) have you read their party manifesto? Nationalization of all industries, massive green projects, environmentalism, pro-abortion, massive taxes on the rich, etc. They sound like your typical European socialists or Democrats

hello. has the world ever seen a group of people more neurotic about themselves? it has to be in their nomenclature. Semitic religious extremism is absurd. i do not walk around stating i am a catholic, though i do consider myself one of the chosen ones. what character are these people to live with? are they hateful? do they make bad neighbors? is it their own society which denies relationships with others? how long will this people cult refuse to join the human race? they appear to meld in American society... all this over a tiny piece of land?